Logitech NuLOOQ

Cue up the theme to The Courtship of Eddie’s Father because your mouse has a new best friend. At least, that’s what Logitech calls its difficult to comprehend but nifty to use NuLOOQ navigator.

Primarily designed for content creators who use Adobe products, the NuLOOQ acts as a jog dial, nudge tool, tool-tweaking device, and more. With the NuLOOQ installed, you can, for example, be zoomed in 300 percent in Adobe Photoshop CS2 with one hand on the mouse applying brushstrokes; with your other hand on the NuLOOQ, you can slide the entire image in any direction and zoom in or out without laying a hand on the keyboard.

Getting acclimated to the NuLOOQ takes a few minutes, but once you’ve used it for retouching in Photoshop, you’ll find it hard to live without. Fire up Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 and the NuLOOQ turns into both a jog dial and a zoom tool. You can also use the NuLOOQ with other applications, such as games. You can easily configure it to act as the zoom and pan tool in an RTS and program the third dial surface on the top of the device to let you, say, change the game’s perspective. We also tried the NuLOOQ with first-person shooters, but the experience is inferior to using the mouse and keyboard.

While the hardware is generally good, the software isn’t. An early demo of the NuLOOQ’s software for the Mac featured a popup control box that made the device much handier, but the feature was cut before the PC version made its debut. The applet is also clumsy to use and configure. You can’t, for example, build one profile by using an existing one as a base. With very few profiles included, you’ll have some work setting things up.

Ultimately, the NuLOOQ will be most valuable for content-creation artists. It’s not going to cause any artistic revolutions, but it’s amazingly simple to use and understand. However, before it will be acceptable for more general-purpose use, the software needs a lot of work.